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Facts checked against both vendors on October 13, 2026.
Choose Claude if you need a finished assistant with defined plans, a coding agent, team administration, no training on commercial data by default, and a way to pin API inference to the United States. Choose DeepSeek if per-token price is the deciding number: its Flash model lists 0.30 US dollars per million cache-miss input tokens and 1.20 output at peak, against 2 and 10 for Claude Sonnet 5.5. For a developer comparing APIs, the two overlap more than the brands suggest, because DeepSeek accepts the Anthropic request format, so the practical move is to run the same prompts on both and compare cost and output on your own material.
Claude and DeepSeek share one thing, an API that developers call with a key and pay for by the token. Beyond that they are sold differently. Anthropic sells Claude as a product line: a consumer assistant on web, desktop and mobile, team and enterprise plans, a coding agent, and an API available directly and through cloud marketplaces. DeepSeek sells access to its models through an app, web chat and a low-priced API, and also publishes model weights. This page concentrates on what the Claude side adds and where the two genuinely compete for the same API budget. Figures come from each vendor's own pages as read on 13 October 2026. All prices are in US dollars.
A weights download gives a team a model. It does not give them a hosted assistant, plan administration or a vendor that carries compliance obligations. Anthropic's pricing page lists Free at 0 US dollars, Pro at 20 US dollars a month (17 a month on an annual plan billed as 200 up front), and Max from 100 US dollars a month, billed monthly, at 5x or 20x Pro usage. Team seats run from 2 to 150 people: Standard at 25 US dollars per seat monthly or 20 billed annually, Premium at 125 monthly or 100 annually. Enterprise is listed at 20 US dollars per seat a month billed annually, plus usage billed at API rates.
On the consumer side, every plan including Free lists web search, file creation and code execution, memory, Artifacts, connectors and Claude Design, Slides and Docs, with Sonnet and Haiku models. Pro adds Claude Code, Claude Science, Projects and Opus. Team adds central billing, SSO, admin controls and enterprise search. Enterprise adds role-based access, SCIM, audit logs, a Compliance API, custom data retention, IP allowlisting and a HIPAA-ready option. Limits reset on a rolling five-hour window with weekly limits on paid plans, and web, desktop, mobile and Claude Code draw from one pool.
DeepSeek's home page offers an app download, a web chat and links to its API platform. None of the pages read state a price for the app or web chat, or list plan tiers, seat administration or audit features, so none are claimed here.
Anthropic's models overview lists four current models. Claude Fable 5.1 (claude-fable-5-1) is 10 input and 50 output per million tokens. Claude Opus 5.5 is 4 and 20. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is 2 and 10. Claude Haiku 5.5 starts at 0.10 input and 0.50 output for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, and rises to 0.50 and 2.50 for prompts over 100,000 tokens. Each lists a 1 million token context window and 128,000 maximum output tokens. Batch requests are 50 percent off. Cache reads are 5 percent of input price on Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 (0.20 and 0.10 per million), and 10 percent on Haiku 5.5 (0.01).
DeepSeek's API lists deepseek-flash and deepseek-v4-pro, each with a 1 million token context and up to 384,000 output tokens. Flash is 0.15 cache-miss input, 0.003 cache-hit input and 0.60 output off-peak, and double at peak: 0.30, 0.006 and 1.20. V4-Pro is 0.66, 0.022 and 1.98 off-peak, and 1.32, 0.044 and 3.96 at peak. Peak is 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC, Monday to Friday, excluding Chinese public holidays.
Take a monthly job of 10 million cache-miss input tokens and 2 million output tokens. On Claude Sonnet 5.5 that is 40 US dollars, on Opus 5.5 it is 80, and on Haiku 5.5, within the 100,000 token prompt band, it is 2. On DeepSeek Flash it is about 5.40 at peak or 2.70 off-peak, and on V4-Pro about 21 at peak or 10.50 off-peak. DeepSeek is far cheaper than Claude's Sonnet and Opus tiers on listed rates. Claude's Haiku tier is level with or slightly below Flash on these figures, and the batch discount takes it lower still. Which cheaper model is good enough is a question only a test on your own material can answer.
DeepSeek's documentation says its API format is compatible with OpenAI and Anthropic formats, and gives an Anthropic-format base URL, https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic, alongside the OpenAI-format one. A team already calling Claude through the Anthropic SDK can therefore point the same client at DeepSeek by changing configuration, and compare cost, latency and output side by side. DeepSeek's page does not promise that every Anthropic feature exists on its endpoint, so features such as tools, caching behaviour and thinking settings should be checked rather than assumed.
The overlap runs the other way too. Anthropic's documentation lists Claude models on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, Microsoft Foundry and Claude Platform on AWS, with the first-party API as a fifth route. DeepSeek's pages read for this comparison describe only its own API and published weights.
Anthropic also documents a model retirement commitment: the models overview lists the earliest retirement date for each current model, for example not sooner than 28 September 2027 for Sonnet 5.5, for platforms Anthropic operates. DeepSeek's pricing page notes that legacy names such as deepseek-v4-flash still work but are now served by DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, so the model behind a name can change.
Licence: Claude models are offered as a service; the Anthropic pages read describe hosted access and no downloadable weights. DeepSeek's V4-Pro model card on Hugging Face states: "This repository and the model weights are licensed under the MIT License." It lists V4-Pro at 1.6 trillion parameters with 49 billion activated, and V4-Flash at 284 billion with 13 billion activated. Weights can be run on infrastructure a team controls, which Claude does not offer.
Data residency, Claude: Anthropic's data residency page describes two settings. Inference geo is set per request with inference_geo, where the default "global" may run in any available geography and "us" runs only on US-based infrastructure, at a 1.1x multiplier on all token prices for Claude 4.6 and later models. Workspace geo controls storage at rest, and the page states that "us" is the only workspace geo available. Anthropic's privacy policy says data is transferred to its servers in the US or other countries outside the EEA and UK.
Data residency, DeepSeek: DeepSeek's privacy policy states that it directly collects, processes and stores personal data in the People's Republic of China. The API documentation home page does not say where the service is hosted.
Training: Anthropic's privacy page says that by default it will not use inputs or outputs from its commercial products, which include the Anthropic API and Claude for Work, with exceptions such as content a user reports as feedback. For consumer accounts, its privacy policy says inputs and outputs may be used to train models, an account setting can opt out, and flagged content may still be used. DeepSeek's privacy policy lists training and improving its technology as a use of personal data and describes a right to opt out of that use by emailing the company. Whether API inputs are used for DeepSeek's training was not re-confirmed from its API terms for this page.
Claude's catch is price per token and the closed model. Only its smallest tier is level with DeepSeek Flash, and the mid and upper tiers cost several times more on listed rates. There is also no weights option, so a requirement to run a model inside your own environment rules Claude out. Residency options are narrow: US-only inference is available, and the only workspace storage geo currently listed is the United States.
DeepSeek's catch is that its own services process and store personal data in China per its privacy policy, and the pages read describe no seat plans, administrative controls or compliance features comparable to Claude's Team and Enterprise lists. Running the open weights yourself removes the first issue and brings the cost of hosting a model of 284 billion to 1.6 trillion parameters, which is a different bill from the per-token price.
Built from each tool's listing. Vendors can update their own listing after claiming it.
Claude lists Free at 0 US dollars, Pro at 20 a month (17 a month annually), Max from 100, Team Standard at 25 per seat monthly or 20 annually, and Enterprise at 20 per seat annually plus usage at API rates. API prices per million tokens in US dollars: Sonnet 5.5 at 2 input and 10 output, Opus 5.5 at 4 and 20, Haiku 5.5 from 0.10 and 0.50, Fable 5.1 at 10 and 50.
DeepSeek's API lists Flash at 0.30 US dollars input (cache miss) and 1.20 output per million tokens at peak, and half off-peak. V4-Pro is 1.32 and 3.96 at peak, 0.66 and 1.98 off-peak. App and web chat prices are not stated on the pages read.
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